Trick or Treat Blog Tour – The Blood Rose Rebellion Excerpt

Hey guys! Welcome to the First Annual “Trick or Treat” Blog Tour hosted by Moonlit Reads!

This tour is the first to come of many. It takes place during the last 13 days of October leading up to Halloween Day. Trick or treat along the tour finding giveaways, interviews, blurbs, and more! You can find the start of the tour and its schedule here!

Here are all the wonderful people involved with this blog tour with their tour posts linked! Be sure to check them all out!

Sixteen-year-old Anna Arden, born without magic in a world where everyone in her social order can cast spells, is exiled to Hungary for spell-breaking. But as rebellion sweeps across Hungary, Anna’s unique ability to break spells becomes the catalyst everyone is seeking. In the company of nobles, revolutionaries, and Romanies, Anna must choose: deny her unique power and cling to the life she’s always wanted–or embrace her ability, spark a revolution, and change the face of magic itself.

About the Author

Rosalyn Eves grew up in the Rocky Mountains, dividing her time between reading books and bossing her siblings into performing her dramatic scripts. As an adult, the telling and reading of stories is still one of her favorite things to do. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys spending time with her chemistry professor husband and three children, watching British period pieces, or hiking through the splendid landscape of southern Utah, where she lives. She dislikes housework on principle. BLOOD ROSE REBELLION is the first book in her YA historical fantasy trilogy, which includes LOST CROW CONSPIRACY and WINTER WAR AWAKENING (out March 2019).

So, let’s get down to the juicy stuff! Who doesn’t love a good book extract to get you in the Halloween spirit? Make sure you stick around until the end of the post for information about a giveaway!

“I wonder why you are here if you are determined to dislike everything,” Noémi said in German beside me. I started a little—I had not seen her approach.

“I—” I stopped. I doubted my prickly cousin was interested in either Catherine’s broken spells or Papa’s fears for my safety. “Grandmama wished to come.”

“And did she warn you? About Whitsun night?” The brim of her hat cast her eyes into shadow.

“There’s nothing to warn of.” Mátyás frowned.

Noémi ignored him. “Tonight is a night of unrest.” A chill pricked me, as if that word, Unruhe, were enough to rouse the ghosts of the nearby cemetery. “In Germany, evil spirits walk this night. In Bohemia, not so very far away, rusalka are stronger now than at any time, able to leave their watery graves and crouch in trees, or hide in the fields, luring innocent victims to their death. And here the lidérc watch for unwary sleepers.”

I knew the lidérc from Grandmama’s stories: a midnight lover, hatched from the first egg of a black hen. A demon lover in some tales, a hoarder of gold in others. The rusalka was, perhaps, Slavic—I did not know it.

Noémi smiled, a stretching of her lips that didn’t reach her eyes. “Did you know that our Hungarian word for nightmare is lidércnyomás? That feeling when you wake suddenly from sleep and cannot breathe for the pressure on your chest.” She raised one white hand to her own chest to demonstrate. “That is the lidérc sucking the life from you.”

After dinner, Ginny helped me into my favorite new dress, purchased in Vienna: an amber-colored gown with double rows of ruching above the hem and blond Brussels lace falling at the neck and about my wrists. I was dismayed to arrive in the entry hall and discover we were not to drive to some nearby estate but to walk back to the green outside the church. Once there, my heart sank even lower as I studied the assembled dancers.

I had hoped this dance might redeem my failure in Vienna. I knew how to sweep into a ballroom, my skirts held just so. I knew how to curtsy to the appropriate degree—when I chose to. But I did not know how to sweep into a dance conducted outdoors, on a patch of earth. I did not know how to keep my long skirts or fine shoes from getting soiled by the grass and the dirt.

And the dances! I’d expected dances that one might find at any society ball: schottische, polka, quadrille, waltz, Roger de Coverley. Each of these I knew. Mama, for all she doubted my future in polite society, had seen I was properly drilled. And truth was, I loved dancing—the music, the twirl and swish of dresses, the color and energy.

But I did not know these strange round csárdás dances, these whirling dances to energetic but discordant music. So as Noémi and Mátyás were drawn, laughing, into the swirl, I stood alone, watching. A movement caught the periphery of my vision.

I squinted into the shadows between two houses. Like the other Hungarian villages we’d passed, the village near Eszterháza consisted mostly of houses strung along a rutted main road, like shells on a bit of twine. Behind the houses spread fields, silent and fathomless under the star-bright sky.

There. Something was moving. My first thought was some kind of animal—a cow or horse, perhaps. But no animal would carry that faint nimbus of light.

My heart leapt into my throat. I remembered Noémi’s words: a night of Unruhe, of restless shades and shadows. Who was in the field? Whoever it was moved erratically, the light blinking in and out of sight.

I set my lips together. Probably some villager.

No. Something about the light wasn’t right: it was neither the flickering gold gleam of a lantern nor the steady, otherworldly blue glow of a Lumen light. It looked, in fact, as though the stranger were wearing gloves of moonlight, a steady silver glow limning his hands and spreading up his arms.

I inspected the dancers and the crowd beyond. Whoever the light-bearer was, he was not one of the local Luminate. Likely, it was a Luminate stranger passing through, wandering the fields on foot. I edged toward the field, my curiosity piqued.

He might be a ghost, Noémi’s voice whispered in my ear. I brushed the idea away as one might a bothersome gnat. Ridiculous.

I glanced around once more. No one paid the least attention to me; even Grandmama was enthralled by the dancers. I slipped into the shadows, hiking my skirts up to an unseemly height as soon as I reached the field beyond the houses. The light bobbed in the distance, silver against the tree line.

I frowned. Something about the situation nagged at me, a piece that would not fit. Why should a Luminate nobleman skulk about a relatively insignificant field at night? Why not call on the local landowners? Surely, he was up to nothing good.

An improbable idea struck me, momentarily robbing me of breath. What if the man in the field were not Luminate at all? Mr. Skala said people from all classes had once practiced magic. What if someone had found a way around the Circle’s restrictions? It seemed impossible—and yet I could not shake a growing hope.

Whatever the source of this light, I had to know for certain.

I stepped into the field. In the spring night, the plants—whatever they were—had not yet achieved their full growth, for which I was grateful. Even so, in my dainty dancing shoes, I slipped and lurched on the loose earth.

For a moment I lost the moving light. I stood motionless in the quiet field. Overhead the stars shone and the moon cast a faint tracing across the ground like hoarfrost. In the distance, the echo of the fiddles sounded plaintive, almost lost. I considered going back.

But no, there was the light again, in the copse of trees ahead. I plunged forward, weaving my way through the trees, my eyes fixed on the soft glow. My skirts caught on some kind of thornbush, and I wasted several moments trying to free myself without ripping the delicate fabric. At last, my patience at an end and fearful of losing my way, I simply tore free.

To my right, I could hear the gurgle of water. Between the dark bars of trees, silver moonlight glinted off the surface of the stream. My mind filled with images of drowned maidens, their hair spread like a veil across their faces. I touched the rough bark of a nearby tree and looked up, but the canopy of new leaves was so thick it blotted out the stars from the night sky. My shoulders tensed as I moved forward; if a Rusalka or lidérc crouched in the tree above me, I would not know it till she sprang upon me, her nimble fingers tearing at my face and throat.

I cursed Noémi under my breath. If she had not succeeded in scaring me earlier, she had succeeded now.

I lost the light-bearer again. In the fitful darkness, I felt the first real stab of terror—not the almost-pleasant frisson of alarm that came from scaring myself with fancies, but gut-wrenching fear. Something seemed to snag in the air around me, as though I had walked into a spider web. But when I

batted at my cheeks, I could feel no silk filaments. I shuddered, imagining the creature somewhere on my body, skittering beneath my clothing.

I could not see the way forward; behind me, the trees were closing ranks and I could not see the way back either. I could still hear music, distantly, but it seemed to come from all sides.

A soft hissing like wind in the trees sounded behind me—but there was no wind. I froze, hardly daring to breathe. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. I glanced around, squinting into the gloom.

There.

Something stirred, a subtle difference of shade on shadow. Something with a sinuous, nonhuman movement. I stepped forward, setting my foot down with the precision of a dancer, trying to stay silent. One step, then two, then three.

The shadow-that-was-not-a-shadow crept forward with me.

I took another dozen steps, and the thing kept pace with me.

It was following me.

I had lost the glowing stranger entirely now. The darkness gathered around me like a living thing, waiting to spring. I pressed forward, keeping the gliding shadow in the edge of my vision. I knew, somehow, with that certainty one gets in moments of high emotion, that I had far, far more cause to be frightened of the thing behind me than whoever was before me.

By the time I’d made it out of the trees, into the comparative brightness of a moonlit meadow, I was ready to weep. The thing following me was still there, though it had made no attempt to draw closer. As I moved out into the meadow, I watched the rim of trees. A shadow detached itself from the trees and crossed into the moonlight. The vaguely human shape had no features I could make out, only

a mouth like a gaping wound.

“Free us.”

A breeze caught the words and tossed them against my ears, tangled them in my hair. Then the shadow multiplied into one, two, three, four shadows, all of them melting toward me in the meadow, with tendril-like arms outstretched to me. But there were no hands on these arms, and no fingers.

“Free us.”

I screamed then and began to run. I slipped and stumbled across the field, dragging at my skirts, and staggered up a slight hillock. I continued to run even as the earth dropped away beneath me.

As I fell, I glimpsed a young woman emerging from a thread of silver water with a face straight out of my nightmares: immense dark eyes studding moon-pale flesh, dark hair clinging in drowned clumps to the sides of her face.

I would like to thank Rosalyn for sharing with us that wonderful excerpt and the prize for the giveaway! I am so grateful that she has participated in this blog tour with us! I would also like to thank Jaiden for hosting this incredible blog tour! What a wonderful idea and what a wonderful tour this has been!

Did you guys enjoy the extract? Do you like creepy, spooky, Halloween-y books?

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